Hynek Adamec

The architect Hynek Adamec, together with civil engineer Bohumír Kula and the architects Miroslav Drofa and Jiří Voženílek, were among the experts who focused on the issues of prefabricated elements and their use in the interwar period at the Baťa company and continued in this direction after 1945.

Hynek Adamec was born on July 13, 1910 in Rokytnice in the district of Přerov. He graduated from the Industrial School of Civil Engineering and the Czech Technical University in Brno. From 1931 to 1932 he worked in the studio of his professor Emil Králík in Brno. From 1933, he was employed as a construction supervisor on the construction of the Masaryk Hospital of the House of Consolation in Brno (now the Masaryk Oncology Institute) designed by architects Vladimír Fischer and Bedřich Rozehnal.

In 1934, he joined the Construction Department of the Baťa company. He came to Zlín with a large group of architects and took part in a number of corporate research projects. In 1935 he was sent to one of the foreign industrial satellites of the Baťa company in Tilbury near London. During his stay there between 1935 and 1938, he joined the Royal Institute of British Architects. He married Marie Išová in London. After returning from England, he continued his work at the Baťa company and at the Zlín Research Institute of Prefabricated Buildings (Výzkumný ústav montovaných staveb).

In 1939, according to his design, small one-apartment houses were built in Zlín, in pod Burešovem neighbourhood, marked as the Adamec type. In the years 1946–1947 he was registered as an official in Prague, but he continued to work in Zlín. From July 1, 1947, he is registered again in Zlín. From February 1948, Adamec worked in the research office for prefabricated buildings in Stavosvit (later Stavoprojekt).

The results of theoretical and practical preparation of prefabricated structures and entire houses were first presented in Zlín in 1943 on Štefánikova Street, where three duplexes were experimentally assembled. Architect Adamec drew here not only from company experiments, but also built on experience with the development of these types of houses abroad. Another six prefabricated duplexes were built according to designs prepared by a working group led by Bohumír Kula and Hynek Adamec in 1946 in the Forest District.

In the same year, the experimental stage moved toward the serial construction of prefabricated houses. Despite the fact that these types were not used in the end, knowledge and experience with the first experimental houses were applied in the development and implementation of the first structural panel buildings. In 1951, Adamec completed a three-storey prefabricated house in Podvesná IV, in 1953 with Bohumír Kula a prefabricated apartment building "G 40" on Benešovo nábřeží, and in 1957 a corner house "G 55" on the same street. Despite the fact that the prefabricated houses designed in Gottwaldov were not yet perfectly elaborated, due to the acute need for a rapid post-war renovation of housing, they spread very quickly throughout the country.

In 1957, Adamec designed the ČSAD (Czechoslovak bus transport) building on třída Tomáše Bati in the vicinity of the polyclinic, in the spirit of socialist realism (so-called sorela). Like Miroslav Drofa with the construction of the polyclinic, Adamec managed to combine this required architectural style quite successfully with traditional elements of brick architecture.

He died on November 21, 1960.

 

 

LH